Ethos / Outpost Santa Barbara setting problems

It's no secret that the first campaign set in Santa Barbara got weird and ended abruptly. We could ignore it, we could call it non-cannon, or we could find a way to roll with it and let it contribute to the greater story. If you've been following along with Rise of Drekis: Chapter 2, you'll see that last option cropping up.

To recap, the original campaign set in this region leaned into "let's be wild and evil" too hard, and the game quickly disbanded. Which is a shame for many reasons, but primarily because I was really excited for a campaign in this region and now it's been left with a taint of awkwardness. But I like the region, and I'm not going to let the area be palled by those events.

RoD2 is set 5½ years down the road, which gives us a few options for where the region stands now:

• The events continued in much the same pattern, and the area is now a brutal, evil, hellscape of brainwashed and coerced fascists. The former PCs are the rulers, and part of a new campaign is overthrowing them. We take their deeds and expand on them, leaning into their cheerful horrors as fuel for the new campaign to deal with. 
• Some force for good rose up locally and the evils begun by the former campaign were put to rest. The former PCs are all dead, the land is good again, and we can easily ignore the events as a blip in history.
• The greed and need for control of the characters contributed to their downfall, and have caused great problems in the area that still exist to this day. Fighting amongst themselves and eschewing the responsibilities of stewardship got them into trouble from which they could not escape. The area is still fraught with the troubling consequences of their actions, but any current players are dealing with the fallout of the characters instead of the the characters themselves.

The swift fall into darkness also needs some type of explanation, or at least incorporation to the greater campaign. What would the local people who survived such things think about that time? What would become the story of that time? A few options:

• The characters are treated like generic evil tyrants, and we ignore the uncomfortable specifics.
• Their fall is mythologized as the onset of a great evil - a curse, a demon, an evil god reaching out.
• So many terrible things have happened that the actions of the long gone former players are hardly relevant with all the of current problems the region is facing.

The route we're taking is one where the actions of the former characters weakened the area enough that they were unable to repel, or actively invited, Voraci forces to the region. These enemies proved to be their downfall, have taken over, and have turned the problem from that of a few characters, into that of a small army with the potential to draw Drekis into a much greater conflict. The people remember the horrors of the former characters, shudder at them, and are convinced that only some terrible curse or magic item could have brought the whole region under such an evil sway - yet their current concerns are about active conflicts and menaces.

Will our current party be facing down curses, evil gods, and mentally manipulative magic in their adventures? That's not the primary story of this campaign. This campaign is about concepts of reunification and rubbing shoulders with the other powerful states of the world. It's about the onset of the Age of Empires. While an evil curse could certainly play a role in that, our focus shall be elsewhere. 

That's it for this peak behind the scenes. This sort of topic rarely comes up, yet holds a lot of tension, so I thought it might be of interest to ya'll. 

Our next post will deal with the new upcoming campaign: Hardly Heroes! Catch you then.

gl hf
Neal "Koibu" Pass Erickson